


Without the Rose

by Dedicate Kiwicrocus (cranky__crocus)



Series: SMACKDOWN '11 Round Two - Team Discipline [3]
Category: Emelan - Tamora Pierce
Genre: F/F, Goldenlake, smackdown
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-21
Updated: 2011-05-21
Packaged: 2017-10-19 16:08:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/202710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cranky__crocus/pseuds/Dedicate%20Kiwicrocus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was nothing without the rose.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Without the Rose

**Author's Note:**

> Written for SMACKDOWN at Goldenlake: fiefgoldenlake.proboards.com
> 
> A sadder tale. Briar's Book.

            Lark was accustomed to the unique and upsetting sensation of numbness.

            She had felt it after a week with no rations, when one of the base acrobats insinuated she had had more than her share, and that it compromised his ability to lift her. She had felt it after weeks of travel through rain, rain, and further rain. She had felt it when her feet had betrayed her mid-show and she fell to the floor unable to stand: not for her body but for her lungs, which could no longer take in air; and her troupe Master told her there would be no more tumbling, dancing, or acrobatics for her. She had felt it when Yazmin did _not_ stand by her side in Summersea, grasping her hand while her troupe and all she had known danced on without her. She had felt it in the Mire when the little food she received was reminiscent of the Mire mud: thick and dirty and useless as she had become.

            Those times had been terror, she had thought.

            Lark had not known terror then.

            She wished nothing more than to feel it—or _not_ feel it—as she fingered the quilt spread over her knees. In one corner, a lone lark in the rain; in another, a solitary rose growing through mud; in the third a lark tumbling through the air above a rose grown in a green garden; the fourth was empty.

            The fourth corner waited. When Lark had last looked, it had been filled with endless promise and potential. She had planned to add a lark nosing a rose blossom beside a loom of silk thread (cornflower blue) and a _suraku_ box holding a brass tree, with briar and rose vines climbing up the garden wall to where a proud _shakkan_ would sit, before the background of a powerful storm cloud and a starling.

            Lark’s tear joined the rain surrounding the lone bird. One finger stroked the corner in remembrance of past pain she could now feel magnified within her chest. Her other hand pressed against the soaring bird and the flower emerging from the verdant garden.

            She forced herself to look at the fourth corner, the empty corner that had captured her ideas of the future—of life and love and family. It was nothing without the rose. The cotton embraced her cheek as she fell forward, nose and wet eyes pressed into the material that she gathered in her arms as a cocoon around herself.

            Numb. She’d give anything—anything but Rosie, who was already close to gone—to feel _numb_ once more, in lieu at least of the joy she feared she would never feel again. Her Rosie was _dying_ : her Rosie who was younger in years and stronger in heart, braver within her breast and more tender yet in her actions; her Rosie was _dying_.

            But the numbness did not come as she fingered the empty quilt corner that had somehow landed upon her face, forcing this future into her sight.

            “May all gardens be a mess for you to tame, my Rosie,” Lark cried into the empty corner, kissing it with tear-wetted lips. “And may you be numb at the end, lest it would bring you pain; for though you would cope with courage, I am not so strong as to see suffer. Let us be numb, the both of us.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! (:


End file.
